Dev Creates Solution for Amazon Prime Video on Android TV

The majority of the big media companies have created apps for Android TV, allowing us to watch TV shows and movies with a high quality user interface and features such as voice search and recommendations. The most noticeable hold out is Amazon, with Amazon Prime Instant Video. One reason is to sell their own competing hardware for the TV: the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. Amazon’s attempt to be both a hardware and a services company has caused them to do some unpopular business practices.

However, it seems like an inspired developer Will Blaschko, MA has figured out a solution to the problem. As he explains, by reverse engineering the mobile Amazon Prime app, he found several intents that can be used to open a video. An app he wrote lets users search for available videos using JustWatch.

Finally, install Will’s app. After all three are installed, launched the Prime Launcher and then log into Amazon.

You are able to browse for popular TV showsYou can search for movies or TV showsYou can look through all episodes of a TV show

Does this work for you? Do you even use Amazon Prime for video? Let us know in the comments below. There are still some bugs, but Will is eager to fix them. JustWatch provides a great service, although it’s not without a few small issues. However, this is a great app and it will continue to get better. Hopefully Amazon doesn’t shut down this solution as well.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.

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Real.Circassian

This method has always worked, the problem is all you get to watch is from app with a phone UI(does rotate) and non-HD. He just created an interface with direct links to movies instead of browsing amazon website. Good effort, but still not the real deal..

NF

Yes, it’s definitely not an official solution, but it is good that he was able to wrap these intents around a simple interface. It’s difficult for Amazon to cut off this workaround.

Real.Circassian

Yeah they probably wouldn’t, they won’t even DRM the non-hd content now and no hdcp too. If only you could stand the quality and having 2 amazon apps running in the background all the time. Amazon is trying to make a big deal out of this prime video app, but this should be the worst time to hide content from users when we’re even streaming live tv now..